Summary

These data measure the effects of blood alcohol content
coupled with officer reports at the time of arrest on driving while
intoxicated (DWI) case outcomes (jury verdicts and guilty
pleas). Court records and relevant police reports for drunk-driving
cases drawn from the greater metropolitan areas of Boston, Denver, and
Los Angeles were compiled to produce this data collection. Cases were
selected to include roughly equal proportions of guilty pleas, guilty
verdicts, and not-guilty verdicts. DWI cases were compared on the
quality and quantity of evidence concerning the suspect's behavior,
with the evidence coming from any mention of 20 standard visual
detection cues prior to the stop, 13 attributes of general appearance
and behavior immediately after the stop, and the results of as many as
7 field sobriety tests. Questions concerned driving-under-the-influence
cues (scoring sheet), observed traffic violations and actual traffic
accidents, the verdict, DWI history, whether the stop resulted from
an accident, whether the attorney was public or private, and sanctions
that followed the verdict. Also included were demographic questions on
age, sex, and ethnicity.

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Time Period(s)

1984 -- 1987

Data Collection Notes

(1) Part 2 is a set of SPSS program statements
supplied by the principal investigator that recode the original
variables and compute new variables to produce an expanded analytical
file. (2) The codebook and data collection instrument are provided as
a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was
developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF
reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how
to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided through the ICPSR
Website on the Internet.

Data Source

Data Type(s)

Original Release Date

1990-10-16

Version Date

2005-11-04

Version History

2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one
or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well
as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable,
and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to
reflect these additions.

1998-02-18 The card image data has been converted to logical
record length, and the SPSS program statements that had been included
in the card image file are being released separately, as Part 2. Also,
the SPSS data definition statements were updated for use with the logical
record length version of the data, and SAS data definition statements
have been added to this collection. In addition, the codebook and
data collection instrument are provided as a PDF file.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

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